Figure 8 On A Bike

Not a pair of cities I ever thought I'd link together in my life. But here we were in Bishkek , the capital of Kyrgyzstan, with a day for touristy activities before making our way back west to Europe, flying into the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The night we arrived in Bishkek, preparing dinner was a bit awkward since the woman who seemed to run the small set of basement rooms (and also might have been living out of a storage closet) stood guard by the electrical kettle and microwave all evening, but after some gesturing and random bits of Russian she happily heated some water for our ramen, let us pop our doner meat into the micro, and grabbed us some dishes and utensils to eat with. As is inevitable, our day in Bishkek started with a hunt for a cafe. Of course, our hunt started far too early (at maybe 9:30 AM?) and it took a little searching to find an open one. Unlike Almaty, Bishkek does not have two quaint coffee shops lining each side of every downtown city block, but a...

Karakol is a cute little town at the head of Issyk-Kul Lake. In the summer it is a bustling tourist spot, and in the winter it hosts a ski resort. Most of the tourists that we ran into were internal tourists mostly coming from Bishkek. The downside to Karakol is the smog. For such a small town it had worse air quality than Almaty and every evening it seemed to get really bad as many people seemed to heat their homes with coal or wood burning stoves. We also never did figure out the industry there but there were a few very short smoke stacks in town that would send some noxious fumes into neighboring apartment complexes in the evenings. Ah fresh mountain air! View of Karakol from the ski resort

Frozen Barskoon Falls high over the valley From Almaty in Kazakhstan we took a bus to Kyrgyzstan as we had read about a very cool ice climbing area there. The bus meandered slowly west to the border with Kyrgyzstan. Once there we had to get all of our stuff off the bus, waddle to the Kazakh border desk, stand in the wrong line, and waddle to another line. Once in the correct line, I was met with a border agent’s halting English and I didn’t recognize the name of Almaty’s airport so I got a few more questions, but eventually he allowed me to leave Kazakhstan. Ben benefited from my hard work and made it through with no questions.